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Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a number of impoverished villages in the mountainous areas of southwestern Sichuan Province on Sunday, reports Chinese state-owned news portal Xinhua.

Xi visited many poor Yi ethnic minority families, who speak their own language and are scattered across the high altitude plains of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. While there, Xi asked the villagers about their lives and discussed poverty alleviation with local officials and villagers.

One villager told Xi when she was sick, she believed demons had possessed her body, but then officials in her village told her that these demons were, in fact, bacteria bred from unhygienic conditions. As long as she changed her lifestyle and paid more attention to hygiene, there would be fewer ‘demons’.

“There were indeed demons in the past,” Xi said. “Ignorance, backwardness and poverty were the demons. Once these problems were solved and people were lifted out of poverty, the demons were exorcised,” he added.

"The most arduous task facing China as it completes the building of a moderately prosperous society is in rural areas, especially poverty-stricken regions," Xi concluded.

It has become a tradition for Xi to visit poverty-stricken areas ahead of Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival (February 15-21 this year), since the Communist Party of China’s 18th National Congress in late 2012.

In January, China announced that more than 66 million people had been lifted out of poverty between 2013 and 2017, bringing the country's poverty population below the 30-million mark for the first time. The country has also made a solemn promise to lift all rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty by 2020.